Books I read in 2023

Disclaimer: this list is probably missing a ton of really good poetry pamphlets that are in my room somewhere, sorry.



Gabby Bess, Alone with Other People (2013)

Charles R. Cross, Heavier than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain (2001)

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962)

Anahid Nersessian, The Calamity Form (2020)

Robert Sullivan, The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of New York City (1999)

Hannah Weiner, Hannah Weiner’s Open House (2006)

Penelope Lewis and RA Page (eds), Spindles: Stories from the Science of Sleep (2015)

Kerry Hudson, Lowborn (2019)

Rose Ruane, This is Yesterday (2021)

Bernadette Mayer and Greg Masters, At Maureen’s (2013)

Nina Mingya Powles, Tiny Moons (2019)

Maggie O’Sullivan, murmur: Tasks of Mourning (2011)

Nina Mingya Powles, Small Bodies of Water (2021)

Tom Raworth, Removed for further study: the poetry of Tom Raworth (2003)

Torrey Peters, Detransition Baby (2021)

Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy (2017)

Nadia de Vries, Know Thy Audience (2023)

Savannah Brown, Closer Baby, Closer (2023)

Suzanna Slack, White Spirit Videotelephony (2023)

Suzanna Slack, Luxury Profile (2021)

Patti Smith, Just Kids (2010)

Jessie Widner, Interiors (2022)

Aaron Kent & John Welson, Requiem for Bioluminescence (2022)

Christiane F., Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (1978)

Kaisa Saarinen, Weather Underwater (2023)

Fern Brady, Strong Female Character (2023)

Felix Bernstein, Notes on Conceptual Poetics (2015)

Rosemary Mayer, Ways of Attaching (2022)

Shehzar Doja, Let Us (Or, the Invocation of Smoke) (2023)

Will Harris, Brother Poem (2023)

Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience (2023)

Maggie O’Sullivan, murmur: tasks of mourning (2011)

Taylor Strickland, Dastrum/Delirium (2023)

Andrew Durbin, Skyland (2020)

Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life (2002)

Savannah Brown, Closer baby closer (2023)

Gareth Farmer, KERF (2022)

Ian Heames, Sonnets (2023)

Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds (2010)

Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (1997)

Samantha Walton, Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure (2021)

Stephanie LaCava, I Fear My Pain Interests You (2022)

Zara Butcher-McGunnigle, Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life (2021)

Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less (2022)

Dana Ward, Some Other Deaths of Bas Jan Ader (2013)

Rob Halpern, Hieroglyph of the Inverted World (2021)

Eugene Ostashevsky and Galina Rymbu, F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (2020)

Amy Key, Arrangements in Blue (2023)

bell hooks, All About Love (2000)

gentian meikleham, Kare Hansen, Sofia Archontis, Ruby Lawrence, William Knox, Meredith Macleod, Leonie Staartjes, Brave Dog (2023)

Tom Betteridge, Dog Shades (2023)

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love (1993)

Johanna Hedva, Your Love is No Good (2023)

Tom Raworth, Earn Your Milk (2009)

Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts (2007)

Robert Creeley, The Charm (1969)

Briony Hughes, Milk (2023)

Eduoard Louis, History of Violence (2016)

Eileen Myles, A “Working Life” (2023)

Daniel Alexander Jones, Love Like Light (2021)

Ivy Allsop, purge fluid (2022)

Stephanie Young, Ursula or University (2013)

Kristin Ross, The Politics and Poetic of Everyday Life (2023)

Jarvis Cocker, Good Pop Bad Pop (2022)

Alice Notley, The Speak Angel Series (2023)

Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing (2022)

Christina Chalmers, Subterflect (2023)

Suzanna Slack, gummizone (2023)

Greg Thomas, Candle Poems (2023)

Julia O’Toole, Heroin: A true story of drug addiction, hope and triumph (2005)

Kristine McKenna and David Lynch, Room to Dream (2018)

Lee Ann Brown and Bernadette Mayer, Oh You Nameless and Unnamed Ridges (2022)

Isabel Waidner, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (2023)

Laynie Browne, Intaglio Daughters (2023)

Naomi Klein, doppelgänger (2023)

Elisabeth Roudinesco and Jacques Derrida, For What Tomorrow…: A Dialogue (2001)

J. R. Carpenter, An Ocean of Static (2018)

Alan McGee, Creation Stories (2013)

Jackie Wang, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood (2023)

Sarah Schulman, Girls, Visions & Everything (1986)

Hélène Cixous, Manhattan, trans. by Beverly Bie Brahic(2007)

Antonio Tabucchi, Requiem: A Hallucination, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (1994)

Bernadette Mayer, Another Smashed Pinecone (1998)

‘go touch grass: towards a poethics of meadowing’ at University of Nottingham, 13/12/23

 A21 Trent Building, Nottingham, NG72RD

 Wed 13th December 2023 3:30PM

This is a talk about meadows. A meadow is a place of expanse and exposure, where Man shoots the mother deer in the Disney classic Bambi (1942). It is a site of slag heaps, fly-tipping, wild and opportunistic overgrowth; the edge land between industrial estates sprung up with buddleia against the odds. Ambling between creative and critical approaches, this talk makes a case for the gerund meadowing as a conceptual and methodological imperative for porous and cross-pollinating consciousness. The excesses of meadows suggest how we might glean forms of abundance and ongoingness from the discards of capitalist efficiency. We will take seriously the imperative ‘go touch grass’, not as pastoral consolation or escape but rather as a cultivating logic of regeneration. The aesthetic tendencies of meadowing — dense citation practise, polyrhythmia, borrowing from the im/possibilities of dream — are entwined with an ecological ethic of entanglement and suspension.

Free tickets

Readings in New York, Dec 2023

I am going to be in New York(!) for a few days in December, doing some readings with a motley crew of Scottish poets: Colin Herd, Jane Goldman, Iain Morrison, Nicky Melville.

So far, confirmed events are:

Sunday 17th, 12-3pm – Scottish Poetry Brunch at Torn Page. RSVP.

Monday 18th, 6:30-8pm – Poetry: A Christmastime Gathering with Four Scottish Poets at Frenchtown Bookshop. More info.

If you have any recommendations of cool things happening between the 16-21st of December in NY, hit me up!

‘allergically pastoral’: chronodiversity in three contemporary queer poets 

Tomorrow I’m giving a paper on Caspar Heinemann, Sophia Dahlin and Callie Gardner at  ‘Imagining Queer Ecologies’, a one-day online symposium hosted by the British Society for Literature and Science and the University of Oxford. [online]

Here’s the abstract:

‘In contrast to biodiversity’, argues Karlheinz A. Geißler, ‘“chronodiversity” is terra incognita’. This paper takes up the challenge to explore chronodiversity (the extent to which individuals have differing experiences of temporality) in a queer ecological context. Following Catriona Sandilands’ call for queer ecology to stress ‘an articulatory practice in which sex and nature are understood in light of multiple trajectories of power and matter’, I will look at contemporary poets whose negotiation of pastoral and lyrical modes offers a temporal experience of embodied difference. I am concerned with how queer poetry intervenes in modes of temporalisation which bind existence to a standardised temporal logic of consumption, expenditure, reproduction and labour. While pastoral is often associated with nostalgic and reactionary structures of feeling, I consider poets whose engagement with pastoral tendencies constitutes an ‘allergic’ aesthetic/ethic. Given that ‘allergy’ is rooted in both allos (‘other, different, or strange’) and ergon (‘activity’), it is fruitful to examine how poets reactivate pastoral modes through a queer and critical reimagining of desire and time. Reading poems by Sophia Dahlin, Callie Gardner and Caspar Heinemann, I consider formal strategies such as complex sentences, lists, imagery, lyrical present tense, citation and space, to dramatise the emotional and temporal conundrums of queer pastoral. I argue that these poets explore the possibilities of ‘queer asynchronies’ (Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds) to rethink environmental consciousness in terms of (allergic) pastoral erotics which variously reflect and refuse the organising logics of heterocapitalist chrononormativity.

Everything change: A panel with Cath Drake, Maria Sledmere, Samuel Tongue

Samuel Tongue Cath Drake Maria Sledmere

Friday 24th November

12:00 pm – 12:50 pm

Main Hall 

Our home is on fire and our houses unmade. When climate change is also (as Margaret Atwood puts it) ‘everything change’, how might poetry reckon with the far-reaching implications and existential contradictions of environmental crisis? In this panel discussion, we ask what tools exist for poetry to retune our senses, coexist with multiple species, tell stories of deep time while envisioning resilient and resistant communities. Our three poets will explore key strands into a climate-responsive poetics: elemental, collaborative, mindful, wild. With close attention to form and language, we discuss practical, ethical and poetic interventions in ecological thought.

Push the Boat Out Festival: Free tickets here.